The Education Front Blog

Hinojosa’s exit

No doubt, Michael Hinojosa’s exit from DISD is a blow to his credibility. Even though people leave jobs all the time, and we shouldn’t be naive about that fact, he told the district after not getting the Las Vegas job that his heart was in Dallas.

I’m disappointed because I think Hinojosa still had the chance, with the right school board, to put in place some greater reforms, like linking a teacher’s evaluation to their students’ performance in the classroom. He had been part of a group that the Dallas Regional Chamber assembled to look at school districts around the country. And during two of those trips, which I went on, he spoke favorably about various reforms. I was hoping that he would put them in place here.

I’ve never seen Hinojosa as being a passionate reformer like Michelle Rhee was in Washington or Joel Klein had been in New York. But neither was he a foot-dragging education union guy. He was somewhere in between the two.

I often wished for more of the Rhee/Klein approach, but the fact is he put in place some important reforms:

1. He focused on recruiting and hiring stronger principals. That included signing onto a Bush Institute pilot program to develop leader/principals.

2. He put in place “principles of learning” that clearly emphasized academic rigor, accountable schools and high expectations. I often saw those principles outlined in a chart when I visited campuses.

3. He set up a superintendent’s learning community that put the district’s worst schools under his watch. That spoke to his commitment to turning them around.

4. He collaborated with the Dell Foundation and Gates Foundation to get more real-time data about student performance into the hands of principals, teachers and parents. He was a passionate believer in using data to help guide instruction.

5. He signed the district up with the Gates Foundation to work on the best ways to measure a teacher’s effectiveness. Gates has been on the cutting edge of this work, and Hinojosa signed on as a way to help develop more effective teachers.

Those are five big areas in which he made a difference. And, to me, they are the kind of reforms that are at least equally important to his legacy as the disappointing manner in which he departed. I think it would be wrong to evaluate Hinojosa’s tenure simply upon the way it ended.

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News, analysis and opinion on reforms being offered to improve schools, whether the ideas originate in Washington, Austin or Dallas. The online discussion will take education policy debates seriously, while it connects them to students from grade school through college.